American Alchemy

American Alchemy

Author: Brian Roberts

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-06-19

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 080786093X

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California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption. Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners--women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West--he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture. Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage--a rebellion against standards of respectability.


American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan, 1859-73

American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan, 1859-73

Author: Hamish Ion

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0774858990

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Japan closed its doors to foreigners for over two hundred years because of religious and political instability caused by Christianity. By 1859, foreign residents were once again living in treaty ports in Japan, but edicts banning Christianity remained enforced until 1873. Drawing on an impressive array of English and Japanese sources, Ion investigates a crucial era in the history of Japanese-American relations the formation of Protestant missions. He reveals that the transmission of values and beliefs was not a simple matter of acceptance or rejection: missionaries and Christian laymen persisted in the face of open hostility and served as important liaisons between East and West.


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Author: University of California, Berkeley

Publisher:

Published: 1951

Total Pages: 1132

ISBN-13:

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